Tag: literary exegesis

In the previous installment in this series on the Great Flood in the literary tradition, we saw that the Biblical flood story, unlike its analogs in pagan literature, emphasizes the God who saves, rather than on the man who is saved. The survival of Moses and his family is part of a pattern that marks the relations of God and Man. We’ll come back to that later, but today I want to take a closer look at the man who is saved from the divine destruction that wipes out the rest of humankind.

Unlike the gods of pagan lore, the God of Genesis remains steadfast in his loving Providence. The rainbow is the sign that He keeps his promises.

All three ancient writers were interpreting the same primeval events, trying to probe the same mystery to answer the question: Why? Why would God (the gods) cause or allow such a cataclysmic event as a worldwide flood? And why would He (they) save one particular man while allowing everyone and everything else to perish? The answer to the first question in all three cases is similar: God (the gods) was displeased with the way mankind had turned out, and thought it better to wipe the slate clean, rather than to allow things to go on as they had. Thus the deluge.

WHY THIS MAN?

In the answer to the second question, however, we see more clearly how the perspectives and the intentions of the three writers differ.

The Mesopotamian poet who composed the Epic of Gilgamesh lived in an age when the power of kings made them seem different from ordinary men, almost like gods. He imagined that the man who was saved must have been a powerful king, like Gilgamesh himself. Why else would any god even have noticed him, much less cared enough about him to save him? So Utnapishtim, a godlike king, is given the means to save himself and those of his household, thanks to one god’s warning. Yet the council of the gods as a whole are displeased with his survival and he is “rewarded” by being forced into a godlike, unending exile, far from the new human race that re-peoples the earth. It is almost as if the gods have said to him, “Ha! Think you’re special? Think you can fool us, as if you were one of us? Let’s see how you like living in godlike isolation from mere mortals.” And, as we know, Utnapishtim did not like it much at all. The blessing seemed more like a curse, and this was what he tried to convey to Gilgamesh, striving vainly for godlike immortality.

Ovid wrote his Metamorphoses in a very different age, for a very different audience. He and his readers were jaded sophisticates who probably regarded the Graeco-Roman pantheon of gods as more of a metaphor than a literal reality. We know that Ovid was also at odds with the overweening ruler of his day, and embedded in his poem a warning against rulers who act as if they are gods. In the Metamporphoses, the gods are capricious, often monstrous, in their dealings with mere mortals, particularly in the decision of Jupiter to erase mankind and all living things from the face of the earth. Still, Ovid knew that someone must have survived the flood, two individuals whom his own mythic tradition identified as Deukalion and Pyrrha. The fund of myth from which Ovid drew his story material made it clear that these two were no “mere” mortals, they were demigods, each the offspring of a divine father (the Titans Prometheus and Epimetheus). This, however, did not make them un-killable. They barely survived in their tiny, unprovisioned boat, and only fate preserved them long enough to find themselves stranded on a mountaintop as the flood waters finally receded. In Ovid’s account, no divine hand saves them, but only dumb luck. They survived because they were tough old birds. How fitting, then, that they should restore the human race from stones, so that their posterity would be as tough as stones to survive the vicissitudes of gods and kings.

What about Noah, then? An ordinary man, neither king nor hero, distinguished only by being a “righteous” man, one who didn’t engage in the excesses and depravities of other men. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. […] But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” (Genesis 65-6, 8, RSV-CE). We know that Noah was a family man, with three married sons whom he had raised also to be righteous men. Certainly they were obedient and respectful of their father and cooperated fully with his project to build the huge vessel that we know as the Ark. So Noah is a moral man, a decent chap who behaves as the Lord God intends mankind to behave. He is a good apple, whom God plucks out of a barrel full of rotten apples.

Despite being 600 years old, Noah did not balk at constructing the Ark.

Noah was not outstanding as the world measures such things — not a king nor a demigod — but this story is not being told from a human perspective. God’s judgment, not human judgment, is the measure of a man in this story. As we saw last time, even Joe Blow, our naive reader, could see that Genesis is all about how God views mankind, how He works patiently to remold the human race into something pleasing to Him. As often as human beings deviate from His plan for them (and they’ve done that from the very beginning), he provides a course correction for those who are willing to follow his instructions. Noah, clearly, is one of these. When God says, “Build a gigantic ship and fill it with samples of every living thing,” Noah doesn’t say, “How can I possibly?” Or “What’s in it for me?” Instead, he simply does “all that the Lord commanded Him” — without trying to “improve” on the divine instructions, as Utnapishtim did. Noah alone, of all his generation, obeys the commands of the Lord, and this is what saves him. Not fame, not worldly power or wealth, not divine parentage, but simple obedience to the Lord who made him. He is not godlike, but he is godly.

These simple acts of obedience bear an enormous benefit, not only for the man Noah, but for all living things. Through the obedience of this one man, all of human posterity and every living thing upon the earth is given a fresh, new chance. The slate, truly, has been wiped clean. When the flood waters subside and God instructs Noah to venture out onto dry land, He says to him, as he had said to Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” But He goes farther this time, telling Noah:

“Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Genesis 9:9-11, RSV-CE)

And He leaves the sign of the rainbow as a reminder of this unbreakable promise.

NO ONE IS PERFECT BUT GOD ALONE

Immediately after this, Genesis shows us that human nature may have been given a fresh chance, but it has not been changed. Man can still go astray. Noah, the righteous man, is far from perfect. Now, lording it over the earth as the patriarch of the renewed human race and as the first “tiller of the soil,” celebrating the ability to grow his own food rather than living off of what God provides, Noah literally becomes intoxicated with power, overindulging in the fruit of the vine his hand has planted. He falls down drunk — and naked.

Prelapsarian nakedness is shameful in a post-diluvian world.

Really? This man was the best of all mankind, the only one worth saving? How quickly he has fallen from the heights of virtue. Even worse, he now seems to think himself godlike rather than godly, for when his sons cover his nakedness to shield him from shame, Noah rouses from his drunkenness long enough to curse one and bless the other, a godlike prerogative hitherto unclaimed by the humbler, antediluvian Noah.

Not so godlike, perhaps, because the true God remembers his covenant and does not punish Noah or his posterity. Noah lives on for three hundred and fifty years after the flood, long enough to see the prosperity of his sons and his sons’ sons, until the earth is filled with his offspring.

If Noah had been the hero of this story, the author might well have pruned out the unflattering account of his drunkenness. Why leave it in? First, I believe, to show precisely this: that Noah is not a hero, but an ordinary man. When he trusts in the power of God, he is saved; when he grows drunk with his own power, he falls into disgrace. Second, the author reminds us that Noah is just one man among many in the long history of mankind — he dies, and life goes on. After him there will be good men and bad and, often enough, there will be good men who go bad and wicked men who repent. What does not change is God and His determination to give Mankind another chance, and another, and another. The rest of Genesis, the “prehistory” of mankind, shows this pattern of God repeatedly rewarding those who trust in Him and allowing those who do not to fall through their own wickedness.

WHAT IS A HERO?

Here, then is the great difference between the book of Genesis and the poems of the Gilgamesh poet and Roman Ovid: the hero of the story is God Himself.He it is who must patiently endure the vicissitudes of Man, rather than the other way around. He has the upper hand, yet He uses it only to correct, not to torment. He alone remains true to His promises. The man who would be godlike must be like God in this: His steadfast love for humankind.

Next time, this perspective will become clearer as we situate the story of Noah and the flood in the larger context of the Bible and, particularly, the role that typology plays in understanding the Bible as a whole and this story in particular.

UPDATE 2016: This has proven to be one of the most popular posts on the blog, which suggests that lots of people enjoy, but perhaps are puzzled by, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. I would be happy to explore more of her stories (I’ve got a couple of half-written posts that are hanging fire). If you have a particular O’Connor story that excites, interests, or puzzles you, leave a comment at the end of this post and let me know — or you can email me, if you don’t want to leave a public comment.

Original post:

A recent comment on an old post about Flannery O’Connor raises some questions that I thought I would respond to in a separate post, rather than depositing them in the obscurity of the comm box. Janet Baker left a long comment (you can read it in its entirety there), which says in part:

I’m currently working on the short story Revelation, looking at the text for what it says about Flannery’s Catholicism, rather than listening to her pronouncements in non-fiction, like her letters. If you read the story, you will note that it is Mrs. Turpin’s virtues that must be burned away before she enters heaven, and that people enter heaven in groups, racial and social. Perhaps you don’t read either St. Thomas Aquinas, or Teilhard de Chardin, nor have I extensively, but if you begin to read about it, you’ll see that St. Thomas promotes the virtues of which Mrs. Turpin is guilty–generous almsgiving, supporting the Church, helping others regardless of their worthines [sic] of help. It was Teilhard, whom Flannery really loved and read even when it wasn’t time for bed, as she did Thomas. Teilhard, on the other hand, supports the idea that we enter heaven in groups and all enter, all, after their individual identities had been burned away. That’s why he was a heretic and rejected by the Church, along with all his bogus evolutionary crap, although he influenced the Church deeply, and perhaps mortally.

I had a friend who used to say, “Sometimes God gives you a sign, sometimes BILLBOARDS!” Flannery O’Connor is famous for saying that her characters were so colorful (critics like to call them “grotesque”) because you have to draw large pictures for the blind and shout at the deaf: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” I’ll admit that, fascinated as I was with her work when I first began to read it, I was often puzzled as to what was going on. I remember waking up in the dark hours of the night, years after first reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” with a sudden understanding of what the Misfit meant when he said, “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

For anyone similarly puzzled, my advice is to read “Revelation,” which probably makes clearer than any of her other stories just what Flannery is up to. (See my analysis of the climactic scene here.) If I’d read that one before I read “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” maybe my sleep wouldn’t have been disturbed at 3 a.m. years later. Then again, maybe not. Perhaps I had to learn something about the nature of Grace before I could get over being blind and deaf to what O’Connor was going on about. The great thing about her stories is that they fascinate even those who haven’t a clue about God or His grace or how it operates in the soul. Such readers will remember her strange characters and puzzle over their behavior, perhaps until one night God bonks them on the head and shouts, “Wake up, dummy!”

Please leave your thoughts or comments below!

My experience teaching college taught me that most college students are poorly equipped to read on their own (most of them don’t read at all, unless you hold a gun to their heads, as I’ve pointed out before), by which I mean that they don’t know how to make sense of what scholars call “primary texts” (works as they are actually written, rather than works as they are digested and described by others — such as textbooks). To help my students learn to read primary texts from any of a number of fields (e.g., I regularly taught philosophical and theological works in my Humanities classes), I developed a 4-step method for understanding, analyzing, and evaluating works of all sorts. From time to time, a student would tell me, in a tone of amazement, that this method had helped them read books and articles for their other classes. (They were amazed the method worked, I was amazed that they’d actually tried it and noticed that it worked.)

Now over on the Catholic Reading Project web site, I’m going to be reading and discussing (hopefully in the company of others — how about you?) a series of magisterial documents of the Catholic Church, and it just so happens that I am no expert on the subject, and I imagine that most of those who drop in on the project or even follow along regularly are going to be no more expert than I. For this reason, I’ve posted my 4-step method over there, in hopes that it will encourage people who might otherwise be intimidated by the idea of reading documents that were not written for general lay readers. If you enjoy reading serious works, but wonder if you’re really getting out of them what you should, you should click the link above and take a look at the method. Then let me know what you think!

Last week when I was writing my previous post about Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia, I visited Ward’s website and left a comment on his blog, telling him how much I like his book and inviting him to take a look at what I had said about it on my own blog. A day or two ago I received this reply from him:

Dear Lisa,

Thanks for your post on the Planet Narnia blog. I’m delighted to know you enjoyed reading the book; it was certainly the greatest pleasure to write.

Thanks also for your post on your own blogsite, which I read and admired. One thing I would slightly question though is the use of the word ‘red herring’ with respect to Aslan as Christ. Sure, it’s a red herring insofar as it has led critics to concentrate far too exclusively on Biblical-allegorical readings of the Chronicles. But Aslan certainly IS a Christ-figure, beautifully so, and the planetary scheme Lewis adopted means that the Christology he is trying to communicate is far more sophisticated than ‘mere’ Biblical allegory of a simple one-to-one kind.

But that’s a small point. Generally, I thought what you wrote was excellent, and I found it personally very encouraging. Thank you!

With kind regards,

Michael

I can see that my use of the term “red herring” was confusing, so I’ve revised the original post to make my meaning a little clearer. I didn’t mean to suggest that readers are mistaken to discern an identification between Aslan and Christ, or that Lewis was misleading readers to make an erroneous connection (that’s the usual meaning of “red herring”). It seems quite clear to me — as I think it will to almost any reader — that, in the first Narnia story, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (LWW), Lewis deliberately made the parallels between Aslan’s actions and the atoning sacrifice of Christ virtually unmistakable. What I had meant to convey is that this connection was so obvious that it may have distracted critics from discerning or pursuing less obvious (non-Scriptural) allusions.

For those who have not yet had an opportunity to read Planet Narnia, I’ll explain a little bit about Ward’s thesis. What Ward calls his “Eureka moment” occurred one night when he was struck by a phrase from Lewis’s poem, “The Planets,” which describes the allegorical personae of the planets as they were used poetically throughout the Middle Ages. The phrase that struck him referred to the influence of Jupiter (a.k.a. Jove, the Latin equivalent of Greek Zeus): “winter passed / And guilt forgiven.” Immediately this made him think of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which Narnia is caught in an unending winter, until Aslan arrives on the scene and allows himself to be sacrificed by the White Witch, in substitution for Edmund Pevensey, who has betrayed his siblings to the Witch. Ward wondered:

Could there be a link somehow between poem and Chronicle? That thought was the stray spark connecting Jupiter to The Lion in my mind, and one by one the other planet-to-book relationships began to be lit up in its train. (Planet Narnia, 251)

That spark lit a blaze which resulted in Planet Narnia, a wonderfully illuminating study of how the medieval allegorical use of the pagan gods influenced the composition Lewis’s Narnia stories (and his other novels, as well).

Why would Lewis use Roman gods as the inspiration for his wonderful Narnia tales? Well, the short answer is, “Because he was a medievalist and an ardent amateur astronomer.” Here’s a longer answer: Much of the poetry of the Christian Middle Ages — and well through the period of the Renaissance — was modeled on, and influenced by, the norms of pre-Christian Latin poetry, which was considered exemplary (think of how deeply influenced the thoroughly-Christian Dante was by the pagan Latin poet, Vergil). The Greeks and Romans, of course, believed that there were many immortal gods, who had their own distinctive personalities and attributes and who intervened in the human realm and governed the cosmos. Today we still call planets by the names of the gods who governed them: Mars, Venus, Jupiter, etc. One of the borrowings (or, better said, inheritances) from the pagan Graeco-Roman world that had the most pervasive influence on the medieval imagination, poetically and otherwise, was their concept of a cosmos in which everything beyond the orbit of the Moon (Diana’s planet) was eternal and immortal, the realm of the gods.

Medieval man, of course, was not a pagan and did not believe in the pagan gods, but he was profoundly influenced by the conceptual model of the universe that he inherited from the ancient pagans. (You can read about this in C. S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image.) For medieval man, too, the earth was the realm of all that is mortal, material, passing, and fallen, while everything in the heavens was spiritual and immortal, charged with the Divine Presence. Thus it was natural for medieval man to find the ancient pagan gods who had given their names to the heavenly bodies to be transformed into personifications, or allegories, of the one true God who reigns over all Creation. Thus, when a medieval poet wrote about the god Jove (Jupiter), he was really writing about those aspects of God (Christ) that Jove embodies: his kingship and majesty, warmth and festivity, etc. Each of the gods represented by the planets of the night sky, in this Christianized cosmos, reflected different aspects of God’s nature, so that poems about the pagan deities were always really poems about Christ.

The insight that Michael Ward hit upon was that each of the Narnia books has its own tutelary deity; i.e., each is attuned to the aspects of a particular planetary god, giving that story its own peculiar flavor or atmosphere (what Ward calls its “donegality”). Not only does the planet in question “flavor” the story to reflect its corresponding planet/god, but the way Lewis portrays Aslan in each story also reflects the those particular aspects of Christ that the god in question embodies allegorically. Medieval writers delighted in complex and many-layered allegory, so it should be no surprise that Jack Lewis, medieval scholar and Christian apologist, should choose such a complicated and obscure way to compose his Narnia tales, such that you first have to find the hidden layer of planetary influence and then penetrate beneath it to the Christological meaning, in order to fully appreciate their significance.

Retired from college teaching, I'm now a freelance editor and writer living in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. When I'm not working for other writers, I'm busy writing books, novels, and short stories, or blogging about literature and the moral imagination on my blog, A Catholic Reader.